With the world now seemingly over the worst of the economic downturn, businesses are once again keen to get involved in hosting large-scale corporate events. It helps them to stand out from the competition, reassures existing clients that they are experts in their field and can be an ideal way of attracting prospective clients.
Indeed, the recent trends report from the International Association of Conference Centers and PKF Hospitality Research showed that occupancy rates for executive-style conference centers increased during 2012. They also achieved the greatest gain with growth of 7.3 per cent, making them more popular than traditional venues like hotel meeting rooms.
But with large venues coming with a corresponding price tag, how can you ensure your event is well-attended enough to guarantee return on investment – and appear impressive? An empty room isn’t a very good ad for your business, after all.
Here are 10 tips to get you started on filling up your next event:
- Create an invitation that looks great so that it will appeal to your invitees.
- Create segmented list and customise the email messages to create a ‘conversation’ based on their profile.
- Make it appealing and easy for invitees to register – offer a discount for early responses and ensure email and registration forms are clear and accessible.
- Avoid long registration forms in your registration process. Use dependency fields to streamline what is needed for each registration.
- Reward last year’s attendees with discounted ticket offers and provide lots of package options for tickets. Remember that some people will only want to attend for a few hours, while others may be eager to get a price for everything.
- Provide lots of information about who will be attending, whether it is trade stands, performers or keynote speakers, to encourage sign-ups.
- Keep talking about your event on social media and via text message and email so that people don’t forget about it. Call-to-Action (CTA) links to registration forms in your blog posts could help you to net any last-minute interested parties.
- Make your event socially sharable. Ensure that your event landing page have social sharing buttons for viral effect.
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Leverage on your exhibitors and partners. Create embeddable trackable registration widgets, CTA buttons or links and pass them to your event partners to embed within their website.
Create embeddable widgets for your partners in the form of a ticket widget, button or text widget. - Finally, keep in contact with your attendees afterwards. Publish regular newsletters to keep them updated on the latest relevant happenings and maintain your mindshare till the next event comes along. You can track their interest level across various subjects by tracking on the links they clicked and segmenting them subsequently based on interest. Create Smart List for custom segmentation.
